your scent is a sweet felony

Coelacanth · January 15, 2018, 08:53 AM

@Spiritwalker or @Grayday ♥ @Stockholm is welcome in all Seelie threads, of course!

This post is dumb because my brain is dumb.

The feather-furred sheepdog crept across the muddy earth in a low-slung shimmy, her tapered muzzle practically bumping along the ground. She was a comical sight, her bright cerulean eyes fixed with desperate [and slightly cross-eyed] intensity upon the set of prints she’d come across, whiskers and nose quivering busily. Catori! The Spiritwalker’s scent was unmistakable, too beloved to be missed despite the layers upon layers of other smells that sought to shroud it.

The first time Coelacanth met her cousin had been a disaster.

View Cutscene

No longer the perfect replica of his twin, Undertow Corten still looks enough like Crosscurrent at a distance that even their most longstanding pack members have trouble telling them apart. His six-month-old niece, newly arrived and barely acquainted, harbors no such apprehension. There is only papa, so she doesn’t bother to get closer and make sure that she’s got the right Corten before she collides with the male’s tawny forelegs and begs him to make everything all right.

She misses the sheep. She misses the barn and the hay and the neighborhood dogs. She misses mama — and she still doesn’t understand what she did to deserve being sent away.

Was she a bad dog after all?

She cries to him, settling her weight on her feathered hindquarters to press her face — just her face, for her forelimbs are tucked against her breast like an oversized rabbit’s — into the fur at his neck, and only then can he hear that she is whining. It is a sound so light and airy that at first it doesn’t register. Then he remembers that his niece and nephew can’t talk. Speaking of his nephew…

They’re never too far from one another, so by this point Undertow isn’t surprised when another shape smashes into him, gluing itself to his hip. This one is tawny, all fire and embers, and he trembles hard enough to make Tow’s haunches go numb. He needs help. Fast.

“Catori,” he howls, and his daughter — the Spiritwalker; the only wolf aside from Undertow and Crosscurrent’s wayward littermate to carry a title; yeah, it’s safe to say Tow’s a big smug about it — comes running. He doesn’t know how she does it, but she understands things almost before people say them. Maybe she can help understand these babies, robbed of their voices before they have words enough to use them on. He disengages carefully, makes a beeline for his grieving twin.

Thank all the gods for his daughter!

Over time Chelan, Catori, Amoxtli, and Coelacanth had grown to be more like siblings than cousins — and by the time the inky Groenendael reached Morningside’s borders, she was so excited about seeing the Spiritwalker again that she nearly crossed right through. Her natural shyness was what saved her from doing a Very Bad Thing, though, and she curved her gamine frame into a seated position a few respectful yards away. Without being able to call for the other female, she could only hope that Catori’s uncanny intuition would send her wandering this way.